I was very encouraged by excerpts from this book 'God in Every Season' by Elizabeth Enlow. It was just launched on 11 Nov 2017. This is her book synopsis. The cycles or seasons of life that we go through
aren't simply an organisational system put into place by a distant God to help
us earthlings keep track of time. The seasons you personally go through, and
the one you're currently in, are the very backdrop on the stage of the greatest
love story of all...yours. The various seasons of your soul are your assurance
that not only is your journey with God real, but your story isn't over yet.
God Himself escorts
you through the changing seasons, makes sure you don't get stuck, and gets the
last word on everything that concerns you, because He cares about you. Seasons
are an expression of His intimate intentionality to keep you moving forward,
progressing, and growing in the knowledge of Him and His true heart for you,
beyond the unpredictable challenges and victories that arise.
Well this reminded me
of the movie Interstellar which I watched again recently. It also talked about the concept of time. Imagine a
world of five dimensions, where time and space are dimensions instead of
limitations. It isn't impossible, just that we are so accustomed to our world of
time and space constraints that we find it hard to imagine. This is something
alien to us. But this will be the kind of world we live in when we go to
heaven.
God is not limited
by time and space. He can go to and fro in different points in time. Just like
how Cooper saw Murphy in her room at various times. He was in the fifth
dimension trying to reach out to Murphy. TARS said that the fifth dimension
beings were real but they could not reach the earthlings. They were not able to
pin down to a certain time and place. Actually this wasn't surprising because
if you could live forever, why would dates be so important to you?
We are taught to
number our days because our time on earth is limited. If you could live
forever, would you bother to keep track of your age? You would lose count at
some point. In a sense God put the times and seasons in place to better
communicate with us. It is a message of His love for us that He is not finished
with us. He is still waiting to move us forward.
Now back to the story of Cooper. He realised that gravity was one
thing that could transcend time and space. As in even when time and space are
no longer constraints or when this earth is no more, gravity still exists. Like how gravitational pull plays
a big part in black holes. In my earlier posts, I likened gravity to the word of God. Isaiah 40:8 says 'The grass withers and the flowers fall,but the word of God endures forever.'
To me, love also
transcends time and space. Beyond all the complex scientific jargon of this
movie, at the core of it was a message of love. The love of a father and the
connection between them. It was this love that enabled Murphy to solve the
equation and overcame the problem of gravity and saved the earthlings. No one
could believe her when she told them it was her dad who provided her with the
quantum data, which was the key to solving the equation.
The other
interesting concept was about time dilation. On earth we see time as finite.
The time taken for a certain process like an object falling to the ground was
almost the same in any part of the world. That was because the gravitational
pull on earth was the same, maybe with a little variation that is negligible.
However when one is in space the gravitational pull varies significantly. That
is why time can be bent, hence time dilation. The closer one is to the
centre of the gravitational pull, the slower time passes.
I saw a parallel in
the spiritual sense. The closer one is to God, the slower the person ages. This is because God is not limited by time so He can redeem the years the locusts
had eaten. Not only that, He renews our youth like the eagles. Hence time is
not finite when it is time spent with God. We also see this concept at work
when an astronaut orbits space after a few years, his peers would have aged
more than him. This is the concept of time dilation at work.
When Cooper and
Murphy were in space, time became a limited resource just like fuel. Even
though they didn't grow older from the time dilation, there was a time lapse of
decades each time they met with a delay. It was a big opportunity cost for
them. People on earth were dying by the minute. There might not be a world to
save if they were too late. Hence the race against time. I also saw a parallel
in this. We the people of God might not age as much but the people around us
like our parents are. Hence we are also hard pressed for time to get them
saved.
Besides Jesus is
returning soon hence the acceleration we are seeing in these last days. God is
not even waiting for the youths to grow up to get them on fire for Him. Pastor
was saying last Sunday that he never saw so many youths coming to God in his lifetime.
It was like a revival of the youths. The gospel revolution is already happening all over the world at a much faster pace than before. We are living in accelerated times. This is not the time for us to be distracted from our mission but to be more focused. To set our eyes on Jesus.
